EduBee · Season Dashboard
What the yard needs right now.
Princeton, British Columbia — Similkameen Valley, roughly 700 metres, semi-arid, with an early hard dearth and a real winter. This is my own calendar, not a generic one. Every action links to the chapter that explains it and the field card you can carry.
Right now · Early August
Winter is decided this month. Supers off, mites down, weight on.
The queen is raising the winter bees — the long-lived, fat-bodied bees that must survive to March. Every mite and every empty frame now costs you in February.
First half · 1–15 August
- Pull the last supers and finish extraction. Nothing you do next can happen with supers on.
- Final honey pull assessed against leaving the bees enough — take the surplus, not the stores.
- Alcohol wash every colony again; 3% is still the line and it is now urgent.
- Heft or scale: a double deep should be tracking toward 45–50 kg by mid-month.
Second half · 16–end of August
- TREAT. Formic or thymol as the temperature window allows — winter bees must be raised mite-free.
- Start 2:1 syrup on anything short. Bees need warm days to cure and cap it.
- Pollen patty from mid-month if rabbitbrush and aster look thin in a drought year.
- Reduce every entrance. Feeding in a dearth starts robbing wars.
- Combine hopeless colonies over newspaper rather than nursing two failures into winter.
- Score the breeding card: this is one of the three fixed scoring moments of the year.
Watch for
- Robbing — the single biggest late-August risk in the Similkameen.
- Queens shutting down early in a hard dearth; confirm eggs before assuming failure.
- Wasps and yellowjackets at weak entrances.
- Smoke and wildfire days: bees are stressed, inspections should be short.
Read this month
- Varroa by the Numbers: Testing Before Treating
Chapter 22 · 10 min
- Autumn Consolidation: Heavy, Dry and Broodless
Chapters 24 & 25 · 11 min
- Reading the Brood: Disease Diagnostics and BC Reporting
Chapter 26 · 14 min
- Queenless Hives, Robbing Spikes and the Lazy Beekeeper
Chapters 27 & 28 · 12 min
Carry this month
Printable one-page field cards. Laminate them; they live in the truck.
Workshop action
Tier 1 and Tier 2 autumn-prep session: wash technique, treatment selection, feed maths and wrap planning.
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A note when the season turns.
Subscribers get the month's dashboard in their inbox on the first and the sixteenth, with the chapter and the card attached.